A4 Art Museum Documentation Center and UP-ON Performance Art Archive jointly launched the annual open call for performance art projects, “A4 UPON: Let’s Perform!” Following deliberation by jurors Cang Xin, Tian Meng, Wen Peng, Yang Yuting, and Zhou Bin, Karboo Collective has been selected as the artist for the fourth installment. They will present their submitted work, “Bow ARC: action, rebuild, curse,” at A4 Art Museum on November 16.
Karboo Collective
Karboo is an independent art collective founded in 2025 by four artists. Focusing on gender, rights, and identity, it employs artistic creation as a method to continuously challenge the passive status of contemporary young artists through exhibitions, live performances, workshops, and other mediums, thereby empowering them to take initiative.
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《Bow ARC: action, rebuild, curse》Performance
Artist: Karboo Collective
Date: November 16 (Sunday), 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Location: A4 Art Museum Outdoor Space
Performance Site Introduction
The performance site “Bow ARC::action, rebuild, curse” comprises four chapters. Using the “bow” as a metaphor for the body, the work explores the relationship between power, discipline, and subjectivity within social relations. In the first three chapters—Action, Rebuild, and Curse—four artists construct a fluid tension structure through their bodies. Without a single controller, they mutually support and pull against each other, collectively suspending the moment of “release.” In the final chapter, they invite the audience to engage in physical interaction, breaking down the boundaries between performers and spectators.
Conceptual Framework
The bow, as a metaphor for the body, serves as a site repeatedly subjected to the forces of power, gender, and discipline. Its natural form is distorted by societal “tension,” becoming a suspended violence—the arrow is on the string, yet the bow remains unshot. Within the performative identity of collective action, it awaits the counterforce generated by pressure and potential energy. Our subjectivities flow, mutually supporting and pulling each other, forming a temporary, unstable tension structure. This relationship deconstructs the singular arrowhead of power, suggesting that control and obedience, action and reaction, coexist within the same field. A fully drawn bow inherently points toward an “outside.” The bullseye we question—be it power structures or capitalist logic—will become the certainty of eternal extinction. Our actions are the ritual of this drawn moment infinitely extended; any point in time and space becomes the anchor of the bowstring, striking our bodies and all we connect to and obsess over.
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Chapter One｜ACTION
The Unfinished Power of Past Lives
Chapter Two｜REBUILD
A bow drawn to its limit naturally points toward an “elsewhere”
Chapter Three｜CURSE
A ritual unfolding in an instant, yet infinitely prolonged
Chapter Four｜Bet with feathers, Winning an arc
Special Guests：Sivan, DingDang, Poyo, Yuting, Qiao Peichen
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Karboo Collective
「About Members」
Linxi Li
Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Limoges, France, with participation in the TKR Master’s exchange program at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Recipient of multiple national scholarships from China, France, and Sweden. Works exhibited extensively in France, China, and Sweden. Currently based and working in Chengdu and France.
Her cross-cultural experiences studying and living in China, France, and Sweden have enriched her understanding and reflection on her personal identity as a woman from rural Southwest China. Through a collage of diverse media—performance, installation, and video—her interdisciplinary artistic language employs a fluid creative approach to liberate herself from constraints of location, materials, and culture. Constantly shifting and combining contradictory states—improvisation and repetition, nature and artifice, intimacy and publicness, stillness and motion—she articulates her contemporary reflections on the body, womanhood, and fluidity. She has participated in French festivals including L’Été Possible, Curieux Monuments Printemps Timide, and Chengdu’s 2024UP-ON International Live Art Festival, as well as residency programs at institutions such as École d’art de GrandAngouleme, La Maison François Méchain, La Métived, and Chendanse. She is the 2025 Collaborative Artist for A4 Literature Center.
Zhiyang Li
Currently residing in Chengdu, Sichuan, as an independent artist. Constructs an “interpenetrating space” through visual practices including performance, installation, painting, and video. Treats the body as a sensitive specimen, immersing it in toxic environments, processes of decay, and artificial settings, observing how all existences connect and transform one another. Attempts to touch the “interstices” between fictional daily life and chaotic reality, seeking to generate effects through personal experimentation across diverse fields in pursuit of truth.
Mingyi Wei
Currently based in Chengdu. My practice primarily involves performance, video, and site-specific art. Rooted in identity, my work explores intergenerational trauma within families through personal experiences, seeking transformative pathways amidst structural imbalances between the individual and collective, and the absence of identity discourse and relational connections.
She investigates the complex dynamics of gender, identity, and family within East Asian cultural contexts, examining how individuals navigate equilibrium within collective cultural frameworks amid globalization and rapid contemporary shifts. Simultaneously, she employs personal narratives to engage with women’s issues and the existential conditions of marginalized groups in society, translating embodied action into tangible artistic practice.
Wu yi
Photographic artist, poet, and writer whose practice explores the interplay between the body and its environment, the symbiotic relationship between personal experience, time, and memory, and transcendental spirituality. Photographic works have been exhibited at Bloom Art Gallery in London, ArTanto Space in Shanghai, F35 Gallery in Shanghai, Chengdu Yulin Theatre Arts Festival, and Huan She, among others. Published in the photography monograph Where All Things Overlap, poetry selections appear in Zero Zero Poetry Panorama and Sichuan Poets, among other publications. Long-term resident near the humid and foggy Tropic of Cancer.
